Finally something concrete and slightly related to poverty and new media.
Cell phones.
In developing nations, cell phones are more popular and widely used than regular land-line phones. An essay I read, in New Media, Old Media, explained this phenomenon in the Philippines. According to an article in the Washington Post, similar phenomena is happening in Vietnam, Bangladesh and other Asian and African countries. Basically, before cellular phones, most people didn’t have their own phones. A few phones were scattered for public use. (The Post article gives the figure of 1 phone for every 100 people in Vietnam in 1995.) But now, cheaper cell phones have made private phones possible in Asian and African countries. The Post article also says that in the Philippines, cell phones can be used as virtual wallets to buy things.
Novelist and de facto cultural anthropologist Douglas Coupland summed it up nicely in his 2006 book “JPOD.” A character muses: 'Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.'
I do remember this. I was in middle school and the only people I knew with cell phones were, well, nobody. They were simply too expensive. Actually, the first cell phone I ever saw was in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.” Michael Douglas stands on a beach in a smoking jacket/bathrobe and talks to Charlie Sheen on a cell phone the size of a loaf of bread.
In high school, my parents got cell phones. My mom had a ridiculous bag phone. Later, in 1996, she got a Motorola MicroTac, with some sort of Atlanta Olympic tie-in special. In Atlanta, companies were eager to test the capabilities of wireless phones, and decided the 1996 summer Olympic influx of people provided the perfect opportunity. Mom's phone was cheaper than normal because of this, but still pretty expensive. My stepfather eventually had the very-hip-for-its-time StarTac.
I got a cell phone when I went to college in 1999. I remember it was very expensive, but my parents insisted on me having it for emergencies driving to and from college. Apparently, they forgot that in high school, when I did not have a cell phone, I drove a 35-year-old car that broke down almost every week. Being stranded on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere north Georgia was apparently not an emergency situation.
I remember getting it and how cool I felt whenever it rang. It was like a little announcement that pointed to me and said “This person is very important!” I hardly feel that way anymore. Now, my cell phone is pretty much my only phone. I have a home landline for telemarketing (and so I have a local number), and an office land-line, but my cell phone is always with me in my purse or pocket.
But back to the developing nations. These people are experiencing the freedom of personal telecommunication that Americans had post WWII. The economic upsides are potentially huge. For example, fishermen and farmers can call ahead and see what prices their products will sell for at market, and compare different markets to get the best prices.
Other cottage industries have popped up around cell phones in these areas as well. In Bangladesh, women buy phones on credit from a Nobel-prize-winning bank, then resell them, or time on them, in their villages. These women now can save up money to start their own stores or other businesses.
This is clearly a technological tool that has brought certain people out of poverty. By making cellular phones cheap enough for poor people to get, and making cellular plans (like pre-paid and these cottage industry situations) available to people without credit or references, economic progress has been made. Maybe the Internet is not the telecommunications tool that can help poverty because computers and the electricity to run them are very expensive compared to cell phones.
One group, though, is trying to make cheaper computers for children in developing nations. The One Laptop Per Child program has developed the XO, a $100 laptop with rugged construction and a simple operating system. It has antennas to connect to wireless Internet systems (skipping the plug-in Internet just like they skipped the plug-in phone). It can also be manually powered, with an attachable crank or pedal for children to use at home if they don’t have electricity.
Projects like this have the potential to be able to connect poor people to the Internet. The developers of this project were forward-thinking enough to consider that the reason poor people weren’t on the web was that they couldn’t afford the tools. By making this an education project instead of a telecommunications project, and targeting it at children, they’re really, clearly trying to do something for the future, instead of trying to make money or solve poverty in one quick step. By giving children the tools to learn how to behave in the new digital world, they are making future technologically-savvy adults.
So, that’s what I found in my deep search for information on Poverty and New Media. It’s not great, but it’s a great start.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Poverty and New Media
So, I'm going to digress a bit here. In my very first college journalism course, I co-authored a short essay about Muted Group Theory. It's not a great essay, but I was 17 years old. It was one of those things I never thought I'd use again.
Now I need it.
Muted group theory is a sociological/anthropological/communication-studies theory that came out of analyzing ethnographic projects. People conducting ethnographic studies were usually talking to leaders of groups, which were usually men. Women's voices were not being taken into account in these ethnographic studies. Thus, women were a "muted group." Since then, it has come under the guise of a communication theory. Non-dominant voices and viewpoints are marginalized.
Another group in that course wrote about Spiral of Silence theory. SofS says that basically, people are less-likely to voice a minority opinion, and by not voicing it, they are self-muting. When the opinion is not brought up, it is silenced, and then may enter into a spiral of further silencing from being ignored and marginalized.
So, yesterday, after leaving work, I headed over to the college library to look for books on New Media and poverty. Plenty of new media texts, but very few poverty books. I ended up checking out a book by Barbara Eherenreich about white-collar unemployment. I found another book by her I wanted, but it was lost. Next, I went to the local public library, and was able to put another book on poverty (by David K. Shipler) on hold for pickup later this week.
Is it obvious that the poor in America are a muted group? At least in new media studies? Poor people may not have Internet access, and when they do, what are they using it for? And, most importantly of all, will Internet access really level the playing field for poverty worldwide?
I'm concerned about the lack of information on this topic. A disappointing search of the New Media Institute Web site found no matches for even the word "poverty." Maybe this is a topic for the communication theorists, the sociologists or the social workers. Does it prove this is a "muted group" locked in a "spiral of silence" (at least on the Internet) because I can't find anything about it (on the Internet)??
I've found a few articles to share on this subject. I may also try to write one this quarter. Let's discuss.
Poverty in America, a project at Penn State has several articles, including one on broadband Internet in rural and urban Pennsylvania
A paper on "Information Poverty" from Harvard University (in PDF form)
A pretty interesting UN statement on the media's role and responsibility in sustainability
Now I need it.
Muted group theory is a sociological/anthropological/communication-studies theory that came out of analyzing ethnographic projects. People conducting ethnographic studies were usually talking to leaders of groups, which were usually men. Women's voices were not being taken into account in these ethnographic studies. Thus, women were a "muted group." Since then, it has come under the guise of a communication theory. Non-dominant voices and viewpoints are marginalized.
Another group in that course wrote about Spiral of Silence theory. SofS says that basically, people are less-likely to voice a minority opinion, and by not voicing it, they are self-muting. When the opinion is not brought up, it is silenced, and then may enter into a spiral of further silencing from being ignored and marginalized.
So, yesterday, after leaving work, I headed over to the college library to look for books on New Media and poverty. Plenty of new media texts, but very few poverty books. I ended up checking out a book by Barbara Eherenreich about white-collar unemployment. I found another book by her I wanted, but it was lost. Next, I went to the local public library, and was able to put another book on poverty (by David K. Shipler) on hold for pickup later this week.
Is it obvious that the poor in America are a muted group? At least in new media studies? Poor people may not have Internet access, and when they do, what are they using it for? And, most importantly of all, will Internet access really level the playing field for poverty worldwide?
I'm concerned about the lack of information on this topic. A disappointing search of the New Media Institute Web site found no matches for even the word "poverty." Maybe this is a topic for the communication theorists, the sociologists or the social workers. Does it prove this is a "muted group" locked in a "spiral of silence" (at least on the Internet) because I can't find anything about it (on the Internet)??
I've found a few articles to share on this subject. I may also try to write one this quarter. Let's discuss.
Poverty in America, a project at Penn State has several articles, including one on broadband Internet in rural and urban Pennsylvania
A paper on "Information Poverty" from Harvard University (in PDF form)
A pretty interesting UN statement on the media's role and responsibility in sustainability
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Today's Reading, take two: Race and Gender
Ok, so I was so disappointed by my film readings today that I’m skipping ahead and reading the race and stereotyping essays I found for tomorrow today.
The first essay, by bell hooks, is titled Gangsta Culture—Sexism, Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap? and is featured in Mass Culture and Electronic Media.
This is a great essay on race and gender issues in rap music, and it’s not what people would expect to hear. Ms. hooks explains that frequently, people call her to appear on television or radio shows to talk about her black, feminist perspective on rap music. Instead, what they get is commentary that doesn’t blame the rap musicians, but the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She explains that to the white mass-media, the controversy over rap music is “great spectacle,” but that most people won’t look for anything more than what they expect. For Spin magazine, hooks interviewed rapper Ice Cube, and the interview never ran because he talked about the need to respect women. When hooks comments on the cover of Snoop Dogg’s record Doggystyle, she doesn’t criticize the artist or the musician, but the misogynist politics of the “powerful white adult men and women who helped produce and market this album.” She goes on to discuss how mainstream white culture doesn’t care about black male sexism and misogyny against black women, but it does pay attention when young white males utilize black pop culture to disrupt “bourgeois values.” This is some steep commentary, and hooks does not back down.
While I can’t really bring this back to new media (music isn’t really new), it does have a lot of value in a macro view. Does the status quo only take notice of a fringe element when it threatens to disrupt the way things are? This idea can be extrapolated in to tons of situations. Will newspapers finally take notice of the Web when it threatens to put them out of business? Yes, they will and have changed their views of the Web. Will the record companies take notice when peer-to-peer file sharing finally destroys their profit margins? Yes, they will, and they’ll start suing. There are so many new media issues to think about when you view this essay as a small example of a bigger-picture problem.
The next essay is by Patricia J. Williams and is included in the same book. In this piece, Hate Radio, Williams describes how the powerful new talk radio moguls (Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, etc.) are constantly making mountains from molehills and enraging the already-enraged middle-class-white-republican males. The magazine the Economist explains “Mr. Limbaugh takes a mass market—white, mainly male, middle-class, ordinary America—and talks to it as an endangered minority.”
I remember this controversy. I remember people on the radio becoming outraged about Mexican and African-American people taking their jobs and their money. I remember them outraged about Hilary Clinton and gays in the military. I remember them outraged about me: your typical left-wing feminist. And Williams remembers them outraged about her: your (in her words) “militant black woman, cranky femi-nazi.” She explains it’s a type of resegregation. The us-vs-them mentality. But in this case, it’s being taken up by the majority, not the minority.
But, she says, there are a few places radio is still used for good rather than evil. She recounts an anecdote from a KMEL radio show in San Francisco. A Samoan teenager was killed apparently by Pilipino gang members. The Samoans called the station threatening retaliation. Then the dead Samoan’s father called and said he couldn’t tolerate the thought of more dead young men. He said there would be no retaliation. And there wasn’t. After hearing this story, Williams says, you can’t help but wonder about the powerful advice ladled out by Limbaugh and friends daily.
This is another case where I feel like radio isn’t really a new media, that early-to-mid-90s right-wing-shock-jock phenomena was something interesting in retrospect. I’m glad most of those people don’t broadcast anymore, or were relegated to bad timeslots on worse frequencies. It isn’t because I’m anti-Free-Speech. I’m not. These people should get to say whatever they want, but not on MY radio. That’s right folks, the radio airwaves BELONG TO THE PEOPLE! Me and you. And the FCC regulates the broadcasters based on what they think we want. And apparently, the masses spoke, since Howard Stern is now on satellite radio and off my airwaves. I just don’t see the point of tolerance of this kind of ignorance and hate. And Williams doesn’t either.
I also think this is another instance that can be brought out into a macro view. If this type of speech is allowed, which it is, thanks to the first amendment, which also gives me the right to say this, what will it mean for the future of our country? “What future is it that we are designing with the devotion of such tremendous resources to the disgraceful propaganda of bigotry?” Williams writes in her closing sentence.
To what end will this go? And what other forms of media will it take with it?
The last essay I read on race and gender is titled Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction. The essay is by Lisa Nakamura and is included in New Media, Old Media.
Nakamura explains that who you are on the Internet is not always who you are. For example, she notes that most people who don’t reveal their gender or race on the Internet are assumed to be white males. And in many studies, even people revealing themselves as women or persons of other races are just white males pretending. This is so interesting because it totally marginalizes all women and all other races.
Furthermore, Nakamura says that since the Internet was developed by superpower countries, and we were the first to access it, it’s seen as the Western world holding dominance over developing nations. Right again.
Over time, Nakamura says, there has been proliferation of women and people of different races onto the Internet, and in response, the white men have made sites to sell us things. Oxygen.com, ivillage.com, and other women’s sites are supposed to be gathering places for women, who have not divorced their Internet selves from their physical bodies.
In another case, Nakamura explains, two African-American plaintiffs are suing a web-company that delivers products to people’s homes. The company, Kozmo.com, only delivers to zip codes with the highest rates of Internet usage, which can be seen as discriminatory to neighborhoods where not many people can get Internet access. However, it gets worse, as certain people in a specific Washington-DC-area neighborhood can’t get deliveries either, even though this upper-class African American neighborhood has equal Internet usage statistics to white neighborhoods being served by the company. Apparently, in some places, you can’t divorce your Internet self from your physical self.
This theme of fluid personification is very interesting when you apply it to race and gender, and even more when you apply it to other qualities. How about old people? Poor people? Illiterate people? Maybe the Internet can make us Post-Racial or Post-Gendered, but only for the people privileged enough to access it.
Nakamura concludes by saying that there are two ways to fix this. The people online can change how they think, or the people getting marginalized can get online with them. I feel like the real question here is access.
In all of these essays, groups being marginalized are the people without access. The rappers are being marginalized because they don’t own the record labels. The minority voice is being marginalized because they aren’t on the radio or the Internet. It’s easy, as all these essays prove, to talk about race and gender issues, but I think one of the real issues here is social class and economic standing. This is something we don’t talk about in America enough. There is plenty of attention paid to race and gender issues, but I feel a seriously lacking amount of attention is being paid to poverty. I’m going to try to look for essays on poverty and new media this week to see what might be being written about it. We’ll see.
The first essay, by bell hooks, is titled Gangsta Culture—Sexism, Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap? and is featured in Mass Culture and Electronic Media.
This is a great essay on race and gender issues in rap music, and it’s not what people would expect to hear. Ms. hooks explains that frequently, people call her to appear on television or radio shows to talk about her black, feminist perspective on rap music. Instead, what they get is commentary that doesn’t blame the rap musicians, but the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She explains that to the white mass-media, the controversy over rap music is “great spectacle,” but that most people won’t look for anything more than what they expect. For Spin magazine, hooks interviewed rapper Ice Cube, and the interview never ran because he talked about the need to respect women. When hooks comments on the cover of Snoop Dogg’s record Doggystyle, she doesn’t criticize the artist or the musician, but the misogynist politics of the “powerful white adult men and women who helped produce and market this album.” She goes on to discuss how mainstream white culture doesn’t care about black male sexism and misogyny against black women, but it does pay attention when young white males utilize black pop culture to disrupt “bourgeois values.” This is some steep commentary, and hooks does not back down.
While I can’t really bring this back to new media (music isn’t really new), it does have a lot of value in a macro view. Does the status quo only take notice of a fringe element when it threatens to disrupt the way things are? This idea can be extrapolated in to tons of situations. Will newspapers finally take notice of the Web when it threatens to put them out of business? Yes, they will and have changed their views of the Web. Will the record companies take notice when peer-to-peer file sharing finally destroys their profit margins? Yes, they will, and they’ll start suing. There are so many new media issues to think about when you view this essay as a small example of a bigger-picture problem.
The next essay is by Patricia J. Williams and is included in the same book. In this piece, Hate Radio, Williams describes how the powerful new talk radio moguls (Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, etc.) are constantly making mountains from molehills and enraging the already-enraged middle-class-white-republican males. The magazine the Economist explains “Mr. Limbaugh takes a mass market—white, mainly male, middle-class, ordinary America—and talks to it as an endangered minority.”
I remember this controversy. I remember people on the radio becoming outraged about Mexican and African-American people taking their jobs and their money. I remember them outraged about Hilary Clinton and gays in the military. I remember them outraged about me: your typical left-wing feminist. And Williams remembers them outraged about her: your (in her words) “militant black woman, cranky femi-nazi.” She explains it’s a type of resegregation. The us-vs-them mentality. But in this case, it’s being taken up by the majority, not the minority.
But, she says, there are a few places radio is still used for good rather than evil. She recounts an anecdote from a KMEL radio show in San Francisco. A Samoan teenager was killed apparently by Pilipino gang members. The Samoans called the station threatening retaliation. Then the dead Samoan’s father called and said he couldn’t tolerate the thought of more dead young men. He said there would be no retaliation. And there wasn’t. After hearing this story, Williams says, you can’t help but wonder about the powerful advice ladled out by Limbaugh and friends daily.
This is another case where I feel like radio isn’t really a new media, that early-to-mid-90s right-wing-shock-jock phenomena was something interesting in retrospect. I’m glad most of those people don’t broadcast anymore, or were relegated to bad timeslots on worse frequencies. It isn’t because I’m anti-Free-Speech. I’m not. These people should get to say whatever they want, but not on MY radio. That’s right folks, the radio airwaves BELONG TO THE PEOPLE! Me and you. And the FCC regulates the broadcasters based on what they think we want. And apparently, the masses spoke, since Howard Stern is now on satellite radio and off my airwaves. I just don’t see the point of tolerance of this kind of ignorance and hate. And Williams doesn’t either.
I also think this is another instance that can be brought out into a macro view. If this type of speech is allowed, which it is, thanks to the first amendment, which also gives me the right to say this, what will it mean for the future of our country? “What future is it that we are designing with the devotion of such tremendous resources to the disgraceful propaganda of bigotry?” Williams writes in her closing sentence.
To what end will this go? And what other forms of media will it take with it?
The last essay I read on race and gender is titled Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction. The essay is by Lisa Nakamura and is included in New Media, Old Media.
Nakamura explains that who you are on the Internet is not always who you are. For example, she notes that most people who don’t reveal their gender or race on the Internet are assumed to be white males. And in many studies, even people revealing themselves as women or persons of other races are just white males pretending. This is so interesting because it totally marginalizes all women and all other races.
Furthermore, Nakamura says that since the Internet was developed by superpower countries, and we were the first to access it, it’s seen as the Western world holding dominance over developing nations. Right again.
Over time, Nakamura says, there has been proliferation of women and people of different races onto the Internet, and in response, the white men have made sites to sell us things. Oxygen.com, ivillage.com, and other women’s sites are supposed to be gathering places for women, who have not divorced their Internet selves from their physical bodies.
In another case, Nakamura explains, two African-American plaintiffs are suing a web-company that delivers products to people’s homes. The company, Kozmo.com, only delivers to zip codes with the highest rates of Internet usage, which can be seen as discriminatory to neighborhoods where not many people can get Internet access. However, it gets worse, as certain people in a specific Washington-DC-area neighborhood can’t get deliveries either, even though this upper-class African American neighborhood has equal Internet usage statistics to white neighborhoods being served by the company. Apparently, in some places, you can’t divorce your Internet self from your physical self.
This theme of fluid personification is very interesting when you apply it to race and gender, and even more when you apply it to other qualities. How about old people? Poor people? Illiterate people? Maybe the Internet can make us Post-Racial or Post-Gendered, but only for the people privileged enough to access it.
Nakamura concludes by saying that there are two ways to fix this. The people online can change how they think, or the people getting marginalized can get online with them. I feel like the real question here is access.
In all of these essays, groups being marginalized are the people without access. The rappers are being marginalized because they don’t own the record labels. The minority voice is being marginalized because they aren’t on the radio or the Internet. It’s easy, as all these essays prove, to talk about race and gender issues, but I think one of the real issues here is social class and economic standing. This is something we don’t talk about in America enough. There is plenty of attention paid to race and gender issues, but I feel a seriously lacking amount of attention is being paid to poverty. I’m going to try to look for essays on poverty and new media this week to see what might be being written about it. We’ll see.
Today's reading: Film, television and new media
In today's readings, I tried to find out more about merging old media with new. For my test medium, I chose film. Thomas Elsaesser's essay Early Film History and Multi-Media, An archaeology of possible futures? (from the book New Media, Old Media), explains the typical attitudes among film scholars on the subject of the digital media.
A lot of these people are trapped in the past.
"To some," Elsaesser writes, "the electronic media do not belong to the history of cinema at all." The physical celluloid film is the be-all-end-all of technology for them. These are the scholarly types.
Some of these people are very successful. George Lucas (yes, that George Lucas) explains that it doesn't matter because it's all just tools. "Are you going to write with a pen or on your little laptop? It doesn't change anything," Lucas says.
But the real sticky business comes when you think about the multinational media conglomorates that own these companies and are invested in different media (companies that for example, have holdings in print newspapers, books, film and web), and how they'll use the future of digital filmmaking to further themselves. Elsaesser kind of glosses over this question, and straight into how it really doesn't matter, that cinema is cinema and the tools aren't what makes the product.
I didn't particularly get much out of this essay in a New Media sense. It felt like it was more about film technology than the cultural implications.
Next up, I read a selection from P. David Marshall's book New Media Cultures titled "Rejuvenation: Film in the Digital World." I liked this essay a lot better because I felt like he chose an argument and stuck with it. He basically says that film can benefit in some ways (special effects, interactivity, cheaper production costs, etc.) from technology. Again, though, I didn't feel like I got a whole lot of stuff on New Media and culture, but I did get a lot about special effects.
I found a great essay on Court TV, but I'm going to save it until I do another group of readings on television. And tomorrow, I'm going to read about race issues on the Internet. "Cybertyping" and stereotyping. Hopefully it'll be more interesting than today.
A lot of these people are trapped in the past.
"To some," Elsaesser writes, "the electronic media do not belong to the history of cinema at all." The physical celluloid film is the be-all-end-all of technology for them. These are the scholarly types.
Some of these people are very successful. George Lucas (yes, that George Lucas) explains that it doesn't matter because it's all just tools. "Are you going to write with a pen or on your little laptop? It doesn't change anything," Lucas says.
But the real sticky business comes when you think about the multinational media conglomorates that own these companies and are invested in different media (companies that for example, have holdings in print newspapers, books, film and web), and how they'll use the future of digital filmmaking to further themselves. Elsaesser kind of glosses over this question, and straight into how it really doesn't matter, that cinema is cinema and the tools aren't what makes the product.
I didn't particularly get much out of this essay in a New Media sense. It felt like it was more about film technology than the cultural implications.
Next up, I read a selection from P. David Marshall's book New Media Cultures titled "Rejuvenation: Film in the Digital World." I liked this essay a lot better because I felt like he chose an argument and stuck with it. He basically says that film can benefit in some ways (special effects, interactivity, cheaper production costs, etc.) from technology. Again, though, I didn't feel like I got a whole lot of stuff on New Media and culture, but I did get a lot about special effects.
I found a great essay on Court TV, but I'm going to save it until I do another group of readings on television. And tomorrow, I'm going to read about race issues on the Internet. "Cybertyping" and stereotyping. Hopefully it'll be more interesting than today.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Today's Reading
I chose today's readings for today because they're different. One is a generalization of the future of media, and the others are a specific critique on gender and the Internet. Through this course I want to both examine the big, arching scenery and theory, but also the specifics. Luckily, I found this tiny book, Mass Culture and Electronic Media (1999), from the Streamlines series. The book has 15 essays/articles/commentary pieces on, you guessed it, culture and electronic media.
Today I read the section of this book titled "Family, Gender and the Electronic Media." The first essay, Family Life by Marie Winn (an excerpt from her book The Plug-in Drug), discusses how television has effected family life. The essay explains how television changed the family dynamic. Starting with a quote from a 1949 The New York Times' television critic that says, basically, that televisions will bring families together and finishing up with the comment that television has basically been a part of the disintegration of the American family. Whew. That's a pretty quick change for the 60 years in between these two writers.
Winn explains that through watching television, people become more passive communicators. People don't know how to talk to each other anymore, they only know how to listen to people on television. She even goes so far as to say that real people aren't as engaging to children as trained actors, and therefore, of course Mr. Rogers will have more appeal to a child than talking to a real person.
Honestly, I think this is a bit too much blame placed on television and not enough placed on the family. If the family is falling apart, nobody ever blames the refrigerator or the washing machine. I know that sounds absurd, but when you think about it, that's all a television is: an appliance. She admits that television didn't do all on its own, but it was part of a trend of events and inventions that ultimately ruined family life. I agree it's part of a trend, but I think this essay needs some updating. Since 1999, plenty of things have become worse than television in undermining family time.
For example, last Thanksgiving, as always, my Dad and I go to dinner at my grandparents' house, with my uncle and his two teenage daughters. When it's time for dinner, we turn off the television (no matter if it's 4th and inches on a very important football game), gather at the table and talk and eat. Until this year. When there was eating and talking, but most of the talking was happening through text messages. My cousins (16 and 18) were texting their friends about how bored they were and how miserable they were. My uncle was e-mailing clients on his BlackBerry. My Dad and I were eating potato salad. Personally, this situation is way worse than television. Before eating, we were gathered around the tv, cheering on whatever team was playing as a family. As a group. We talked about football and bowl game bids and what college players would be drafted. Personally, it's more offensive to me when someone has a private conversation via text message at the table than my uncle craning his neck to see the television from the dining room.
I don't agree with her that we are less effective oral communicators because of television. I learned to speak and write and read at a very early age all because of Sesame Street and other PBS programming. I would like to read this same essay updated for 2007. Maybe tv isn't the problem anymore. Maybe it's something worse.
The second and third essays in the section were on violence in the media. The first piece, by Sissela Bok (Aggression: The Impact of Media Violence) explains that when children see violence on television they learn to be violent. She gives some breathing room and says that drugs and weapons and bad parenting and poverty may play a part too. The next essay, by Mike Males (Who Us? Stop Blaming Kids and TV), says that REAL violence is just as bad and influential as fake tv violence. He uses the often-cited statistic that the average American child will see 20,000 violent acts on tv before graduating from high school, and then adds another: During that 18 years, 15 million real domestic violent incidents will happen and cause 10 million serious injuries and 40,000 child deaths. He blames parents for violent children, and political action committees for making mountains from molehills. (For example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving led an aggressive campaign against the Budweiser frog commercials, even though a survey proved that kids found the ads funny, but they didn't make them want to drink. Also, 90% of the country's 16,000 alcohol-related traffic deaths per year are caused by persons 21+.)
Males' essay is a little more convincing because he uses hard numbers, facts and data to back himself up. He also would rather point many fingers in different places than just blame one specific thing for all problems. Bok's essay is less convincing because when she uses hard data, it doesn't always support her statements.
The final essay in the section is by Barbara Kantrowitz and is on gender issues on the Internet. Men, Women, and Computers hypothesizes that women don't feel welcome on the Internet. She uses interesting data and anecdotal evidence to back herself up as well. Girls and boys are equally interested in computers until about fifth grade, says a University of Minnesota sociologist. Then it becomes Barbie vs. Nintendo. Boys play video games, girls do their nails. Women are forced out (by frustration or hazing) of computer science departments and classes. Kantrowitz does explain how things are turning around though. The advent of women's-centered Internet sites, discussion forums and classes helped women become more comfortable on the Web. But fundamentally, she says, it's about the relationships women have with technology.
This is very interesting to me. Kantrowitz says that men imagine that technology can make them powerful, help them transcend their limitations and that women imagine computers are a means to an end that help people do work. This fundamental difference (technology as toy vs technology as tool) is mentioned in the very last paragraph, just where I wanted a lot more.
Overall, her essay is interesting, but outdated. I don't believe the Internet is dudes-only anymore. I do, however, think what she said about gendered approaches to technology does hold true.
After these very practical and narrow papers, I read Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Message (excerpted in The New Media Reader). This is grand theory in the grandest and most theoretical sense. Basically, McLuhan says that it doesn't matter what you say, it's purely how you say it. Content is irrelevant. And to a huge extent, I agree with him more after reading the other essays. Women are afraid of the Internet because it's "The Internet," not because of the content. People read glossy magazines because they're pretty. I have read this essay many times, and I've always felt like I got it, but rarely felt like it mattered. I am a content person. I want to be a writer. Will people buy my book just because it's a book? Hopefully not. But the world does not exist in hopefuls.
But McLuhan is right. At least a little. A few weeks ago a friend was in my apartment. On the coffee table are stacks of unread magazines (I subscribe to way too many). "The New Yorker," "Rolling Stone" and "Paste" receive no notice, but there, on one stack, is an issue of "Esquire."
"That's a man magazine," she said.
I started to explain the history of Esquire and literary journalism and the shift in reporting and writing in the 70s and Joan Didion. It didn't matter to her. The medium, Esquire, a "man magazine" was more important than the message, the 60+ years of literary and journalism history.
So, that's what I read today and what I thought about it. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll be reading essays about film, television and music and how new media has helped or hindered them.
Today I read the section of this book titled "Family, Gender and the Electronic Media." The first essay, Family Life by Marie Winn (an excerpt from her book The Plug-in Drug), discusses how television has effected family life. The essay explains how television changed the family dynamic. Starting with a quote from a 1949 The New York Times' television critic that says, basically, that televisions will bring families together and finishing up with the comment that television has basically been a part of the disintegration of the American family. Whew. That's a pretty quick change for the 60 years in between these two writers.
Winn explains that through watching television, people become more passive communicators. People don't know how to talk to each other anymore, they only know how to listen to people on television. She even goes so far as to say that real people aren't as engaging to children as trained actors, and therefore, of course Mr. Rogers will have more appeal to a child than talking to a real person.
Honestly, I think this is a bit too much blame placed on television and not enough placed on the family. If the family is falling apart, nobody ever blames the refrigerator or the washing machine. I know that sounds absurd, but when you think about it, that's all a television is: an appliance. She admits that television didn't do all on its own, but it was part of a trend of events and inventions that ultimately ruined family life. I agree it's part of a trend, but I think this essay needs some updating. Since 1999, plenty of things have become worse than television in undermining family time.
For example, last Thanksgiving, as always, my Dad and I go to dinner at my grandparents' house, with my uncle and his two teenage daughters. When it's time for dinner, we turn off the television (no matter if it's 4th and inches on a very important football game), gather at the table and talk and eat. Until this year. When there was eating and talking, but most of the talking was happening through text messages. My cousins (16 and 18) were texting their friends about how bored they were and how miserable they were. My uncle was e-mailing clients on his BlackBerry. My Dad and I were eating potato salad. Personally, this situation is way worse than television. Before eating, we were gathered around the tv, cheering on whatever team was playing as a family. As a group. We talked about football and bowl game bids and what college players would be drafted. Personally, it's more offensive to me when someone has a private conversation via text message at the table than my uncle craning his neck to see the television from the dining room.
I don't agree with her that we are less effective oral communicators because of television. I learned to speak and write and read at a very early age all because of Sesame Street and other PBS programming. I would like to read this same essay updated for 2007. Maybe tv isn't the problem anymore. Maybe it's something worse.
The second and third essays in the section were on violence in the media. The first piece, by Sissela Bok (Aggression: The Impact of Media Violence) explains that when children see violence on television they learn to be violent. She gives some breathing room and says that drugs and weapons and bad parenting and poverty may play a part too. The next essay, by Mike Males (Who Us? Stop Blaming Kids and TV), says that REAL violence is just as bad and influential as fake tv violence. He uses the often-cited statistic that the average American child will see 20,000 violent acts on tv before graduating from high school, and then adds another: During that 18 years, 15 million real domestic violent incidents will happen and cause 10 million serious injuries and 40,000 child deaths. He blames parents for violent children, and political action committees for making mountains from molehills. (For example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving led an aggressive campaign against the Budweiser frog commercials, even though a survey proved that kids found the ads funny, but they didn't make them want to drink. Also, 90% of the country's 16,000 alcohol-related traffic deaths per year are caused by persons 21+.)
Males' essay is a little more convincing because he uses hard numbers, facts and data to back himself up. He also would rather point many fingers in different places than just blame one specific thing for all problems. Bok's essay is less convincing because when she uses hard data, it doesn't always support her statements.
The final essay in the section is by Barbara Kantrowitz and is on gender issues on the Internet. Men, Women, and Computers hypothesizes that women don't feel welcome on the Internet. She uses interesting data and anecdotal evidence to back herself up as well. Girls and boys are equally interested in computers until about fifth grade, says a University of Minnesota sociologist. Then it becomes Barbie vs. Nintendo. Boys play video games, girls do their nails. Women are forced out (by frustration or hazing) of computer science departments and classes. Kantrowitz does explain how things are turning around though. The advent of women's-centered Internet sites, discussion forums and classes helped women become more comfortable on the Web. But fundamentally, she says, it's about the relationships women have with technology.
This is very interesting to me. Kantrowitz says that men imagine that technology can make them powerful, help them transcend their limitations and that women imagine computers are a means to an end that help people do work. This fundamental difference (technology as toy vs technology as tool) is mentioned in the very last paragraph, just where I wanted a lot more.
Overall, her essay is interesting, but outdated. I don't believe the Internet is dudes-only anymore. I do, however, think what she said about gendered approaches to technology does hold true.
After these very practical and narrow papers, I read Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Message (excerpted in The New Media Reader). This is grand theory in the grandest and most theoretical sense. Basically, McLuhan says that it doesn't matter what you say, it's purely how you say it. Content is irrelevant. And to a huge extent, I agree with him more after reading the other essays. Women are afraid of the Internet because it's "The Internet," not because of the content. People read glossy magazines because they're pretty. I have read this essay many times, and I've always felt like I got it, but rarely felt like it mattered. I am a content person. I want to be a writer. Will people buy my book just because it's a book? Hopefully not. But the world does not exist in hopefuls.
But McLuhan is right. At least a little. A few weeks ago a friend was in my apartment. On the coffee table are stacks of unread magazines (I subscribe to way too many). "The New Yorker," "Rolling Stone" and "Paste" receive no notice, but there, on one stack, is an issue of "Esquire."
"That's a man magazine," she said.
I started to explain the history of Esquire and literary journalism and the shift in reporting and writing in the 70s and Joan Didion. It didn't matter to her. The medium, Esquire, a "man magazine" was more important than the message, the 60+ years of literary and journalism history.
So, that's what I read today and what I thought about it. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll be reading essays about film, television and music and how new media has helped or hindered them.
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